November 2016

11/30/2016

Findings of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS, which examined students around the world between the years of 2011 to 2015, appear to confirm earlier observations of a decline in test scores by PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment.

According to TIMSS figures, male students were largely responsible for the worsened results, while girls surpassed boys in all of the subject areas.

Just five years ago the differences between the sexes were virtually negligible, with boys only a little bit ahead.

It was in 2015 that the tested girl students began to do better than boys in the subjects of maths and natural sciences, the researchers said.

Also, the proportion of boys who have excellent skills has declined, and that's the main reason which caused boys' TIMSS scores to go down, according to Jyväskylä University's TIMSS national coordinator Jouni Vettenranta and project researcher Jenna Hiltunen.

Lower overall scores

Overall, Finnish children slipped from third to fifth place in natural sciences and in mathematics they dropped from eighth to 13th place.

Among the leading academic test-scoring countries, Finland is the only one that has seen test results of fourth graders decline for four years in a row.

Vettenranta and Hiltunen said that the TIMSS study shows that the differences between fourth graders' abilities can be seen before they even start school.

Young pupils who have solid reading and math skills before the first grade do much better on the exams than those with weaker basic skills. Children's educational careers begin at home even before entering the school system.

Adequate learning materials and resources at home - as well as parents' attitudes toward learning - have significant effects on a child's development at school, the TIMSS researchers said.

Some good news in the details

There was some good news for Finnish educators in the new results; the study found that differences of test scores between regions across Finland are minimal - a situation which barely change over the course of the study.

Overall Finland's educational system appears to remain at a good level. Finland is still in second place regarding natural sciences and maths among OECD-nations and far above OECD-nation averages.

The TIMSS study is published every four years, based on tests taken by more than half a million students aged 9 to 14 in nearly 50 countries. In Finland some 5,015 fourth graders from 158 schools participated in the study.

11/29/2016

“I have been very tired—more tired and confused than I have ever been in my life,” Kristiina Chartouni, a veteran Finnish educator who began teaching American high-school students this autumn, said in an email. “I am supposedly doing what I love, but I don't recognize this profession as the one that I fell in love with in Finland.”

Chartouni, who is a Canadian citizen through marriage, moved from Finland to Florida with her family in 2014, due in part to her husband’s employment situation. After struggling to maintain an income and ultimately dropping out of an ESL teacher-training program, a school in Tennessee contacted her this past spring about a job opening. Shortly thereafter, Chartouni had the equivalent of a full-time teaching load as a foreign-language teacher at two public high schools in the Volunteer State, and her Finnish-Canadian family moved again. (Chartouni holds a master’s degree in foreign-language teaching from Finland’s University of Jyväskylä.)

In Tennessee, Chartouni has encountered a different teaching environment from the one she was used to in her Nordic homeland—one in which she feels like she’s “under a microscope.” She’s adjusting to relatively frequent observations and evaluations of her teaching, something she never experienced in her home country. (A principal or an administrator in Finland, Chartouni noted, may briefly observe a teacher’s lesson, but not on a regular basis.)

Already this autumn, she’s had a couple of visitors in her American classroom: a representative of a nearby university, where she’s completing studies to receive a local teaching license, and her “professional learning community” coach. A district administrator will come to visit her classroom, too. According to Chartouni, these three evaluators will make a few unexpected visits throughout this school year.

Chartouni misses that feeling of being trusted as a professional in Finland. There, after receiving her teaching timetable at the start of each school year, she would be given the freedom to prepare curriculum-aligned lessons, which matched her preferences and teaching style.

“I wanted to do my best all the time,” she said, “because they trusted my skills and abilities.” I encountered something similar when I moved to Finland from the U.S., where I started my teaching career.